Many of our strategic advisory assignments are forward looking to help government and private sector clients determine their strategic direction within the changing resource recovery and waste management environment. Thus, for some time now, we have been looking at the transformation and maturing of the waste management sector, and at the future trends that the industry will face.
An area of concern for us, and others in and associated with the industry, relates to the current and future skills needs of the industry, and the capacity of the industry to respond to the changing demands that we all foresee.
In one of his many roles, Paul Howlett represents the waste industry at the Construction and Property Services Industry Skills Council (CPSISC) – the successor of the Industry Training Advisory Board. This organisation has coverage of the waste industry in terms of competencies, training and skills development, and Alan Ross, the CEO of CPSISC indicated that he was prepared to support a Wright Corporate Strategy initiative to underwrite a skills audit and future employment needs analysis for the waste management sector.
Backing up the support from CPSISC, Wright Corporate Strategy received modest financial support from the following five key organisations and agencies involved in waste management to help cover costs of our researcher for the eight-month project:
Construction & Property Services Industry Skills Council,
Waste Management Association of Australia,
Zero Waste SA,
NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and
Sustainability Victoria.
The skills audit and needs analysis provides key decision-makers across the industry with vital information on the requirements that must be met if the industry is to deliver on the ambitious targets we have for waste reduction and resource recovery. Further, this key information will be an essential tool when the industry is involved in bidding for competitive development funds from the Government of Australia to support our industry’s needs in preparing tools and materials that will be required in the years ahead for skills development.
In the first phase of the project, Rebecca Walter our researcher, assembled data relating to labour productivity for various activities in the waste value chain. For example, both private sector contractors and local government authorities with day labour workforces, give us confidential data on the number of employees that they engage to deliver their various waste management services – including blue collar workers, education officers, contracts managers and white collar staff. In addition they have given us the number of services that the crews manage.
From this data, and similar data for recycling, transfer stations, landfills, green waste plants etc., we prepared lists of the numbers of people in various job categories per unit of work done – premises services, or tonnes managed – i.e. productivity rates applicable to various industry activities.
This allowed us to prepare an estimate of the total number of people employed in the sectors covered, for each job category at capital city, regional areas, state and national levels, based on documented and estimated services delivered and/or tonnes managed.
Collecting the productivity data was a rather lengthy process, especially with the need to guarantee contributors high levels of confidentiality for their data. However, we assembled a good spread of data covering metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, and both the public and private sectors, and we are confident in the relevance of the data for forward comparative projections.
We then looked at the forward projections from each jurisdiction for waste reduction and diversion from disposal to value-adding processing in the near to medium term. This gave us a set of tonnes to be managed and services to be delivered in the future, against which we applied the productivity metrics to forecast the employment levels in each of the job categories some ten-years hence.
Comparing the two sets of employment data (today and ten-years hence) identified the shift that can be expected in job category numbers and thus the skill demand in the future.
The official outlet for the information collated and publicly available is our web site, and the link below will take you to a report from the project. However, to broaden distribution of the data, we arranged with the publishers of WME magazine and InsideWaste to incorporate a report as a supplement in one edition of their magazine. This was accompanied by some advertisements from parties associated with employment, skills and training in the waste management sector, who assisted with the cost of production and run-on printing.
The link below will take you to a copy of the WME document that featured in the May 2006 edition of InsideWaste, and give you access to the key employment and job growth statistics.
We hope that this data can be used productively by the industry and the organisations that support the industry. And, in conclusion, Wright Corporate Strategy would like to thank the following organisations for their support in defraying some of our costs in researching, preparing and making this material widely available to the industry:
Financial Support:
Construction & Property Services Industry Skills Council,
Waste Management Association of Australia,
Zero Waste SA,
NSW Department of Environment and Conservation, and
